Firstly, while various waves of immigration have made the US more Catholic in a demographic sense, it remains in a real sense a very Protestant country. A Catholic prelate reflects in public in what the right thing to do is, what it means to follow the example of Christ. But for those who believe on some level in predestination, this moral angst is faggoty at best and possibly blasphemous.
Secondly, more specifically, a kind of Protestant ethic―certainly not endemic to all Protestants, but prevalent―sees wealth as a virtue in itself and an earthly measure of wisdom. Thus Silicon Valley honchos have leveraged being billionaires with at least one trillionaire among them into a new status as public sages. This is not a first.
This thoughtful article gives a counter-read on the Dark Enlightenment, possibly the most common philosophy used in justifying the elevation of tech CEOs into a new aristocracy. Which is something that they support for obvious reasons, but there's no reason for the rest of us to roll over for it. At the very least we can dare to call it the Dork Enlightenment.
2 comments:
Pope Leo XIV insists on the need to ensure that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, thereby widening the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution. The third principle, subsidiarity, requires humanity to overcome “any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life” in favor of shared responsibility.
and you can't say fairer than that.
C.S. Lewis had the following to say about predestination (well, actully he had a few things to say but I think this is pertinent):
After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone.”
There are people whose beings are centred around total selfishness and they have long enjoyed misinterpreting Friedrich Nietzsche in referring to the quote "God is Dead". He wasn't celebrating it as something to be glad about - let the good times roll - but that "God is Dead" to so many selfish people.
The article you posted is a good one. Whenever the subject of tech CEOs arises I think of the sardonicism expressed in Iain M. Banks Culture novels. The Minds in those tales are a lesson in caution to us all as they are so far beyond our human level of intelligence and wisdom it's impossible to imagine. The Dork Enlightenment describes the tech lords perfectly.
Unfortunately, the technologies that have been in the spotlight most recently seem destined to be concentrated in very few hands. More to the point, so are the wealth and power associated with them. The new class of capitalists believe in optimization, but don't believe in moderation. And while tycoons of the past like Andrew Carnegie would perform philanthropy out of concern for their reputations if not their souls, there's very little of that going on now.
The Church has been wrestling with the questions of free will and virtue for a very long time now. That means that Leo is drawing on an old tradition. He also believes in the spirit, in what is still a very materialistic age. You don't have to be a member of any particular religion to find value in that.
Another, less famous quote from Nietzsche is "And now ye upbraid me for teaching that there is no reward-giver, nor paymaster?" When he spoke of God being dead he meant the simplistic idea of a God that keeps score, rewarding virtue and punishing sin. Not that the industrialist God who had already blessed the prosperous was any better, or really any different. Nietzsche wanted to make people think seriously about ethics again.
One alarming statistic is that while the average CEO's salary was thirteen times the average worker in the 1950s, it is now 246 times the average worker's pay. Why are they deserving of such compensation? Well, they say they are.
Post a Comment